About

The Scottish Ruby User Group is a collection of people who are linked
with Scotland and have an interest in Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
We meet every month in Edinburgh
for presentations from members and guests, and a chat about Ruby and
related subjects. All are welcome, and there are no subscriptions or
costs involved.

Edinburgh

We meet in Edinburgh on the second Thursday of the month at 18:00
onwards. Meetings are held at CodeBase, in Argyle House on
Castle Terrace. Head to into the reception, and you’ll be
directed to the meeting.

You can browse and subscribe to the list using the
ScotRUG Google Group information page. The list is
for announcements of activities and general Ruby support and
discussion; feel free to post any questions you may have.

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors. Be careful here! “Code Clan” are right next door, but that’s not where we are!

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

2019! Ruby 2.6! RailsConf Call for Proposals is open! I mean. Goodness. The days are getting lighter, though they will certainly get colder. What I’m saying is: there’s stuff going on.

This time of year can be a little slow as the year ramps up. To reflect this, it’ll be a gentle meetup tomorrow. James will work through a live example of getting Stimulus.js set up on a new Rails 5 project, and we can work through it together.

CodeBase has water available from their kitchen, or feel free to bring your own drinks or snacks. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Another year draws to a close. Natural light is now a fleeting thing, but the nights make up for it with decorations, subtle sparkles and gigantic spinning neon rides on Princes Street.

Come Christmas, the Ruby core team will deliver us a lovely present: a new Ruby release! If you’re counting, this year’s will be 2.6. So it’s probably worth having a look around the Ruby world at what’s happening. James will kick off the meet up with a few points on the current state of Ruby, from pulling the Standard Library into gems, to Sorbet’s type checking. Then we can talk about whatever we like! So, whether you are brand new to Ruby, or you have something you’re interested in exploring, come along and let’s have a chat.

CodeBase has water available from their kitchen, or feel free to bring your own drinks or snacks. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Changeable weather, diminishing light and hours jumping back and forth. October is a month of contrasts. After having an excellent talk last month on a useful programming tool written in Ruby, it makes sense for us to look at one of the many tools that help us to write Ruby.

Visual Studio Code has been around for a few years, and is very well known and used in the JavaScript world. James Bell will give a brief introduction to VS Code, how you can set it up for Ruby use and one or two of its more powerful features. Bring along a laptop if you can, and we can run a wee workshop on getting it set up and having a play around.

CodeBase has water available from their kitchen, or feel free to bring your own drinks or snacks. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

It’s September, and ScotRUG is back in Edinburgh! Hopefully August brought you what you were looking for, along with a delightful splash of theatre, music, books, comedy or poetry. As the tourists drift away and the city puts on its usual lovely September display, we can start to enjoy the onset of autumn; delicious vegetables, warm sunshine and cool evenings await us. As is true at any time of year, gathering people around shared interests seems good right now. So, on that note:

This month, Dave Jones is coming to speak to us about a gem he’s built. Picture the situation: you’ve spent time at work crafting a perfect configuration for your editor of choice. You realise there’s some programming thing you want to play with at home over the weekend, but you haven’t updated your configuration at home in months. If you’ve ever tried to copy settings you’ve careful crafted on one computer to another, you’ll recognize the problems here. Do you email them to yourself? Commit them to a version control system you have access to in both places? Ah, but how do you configure your access to the version control system?

Dave decided that he wanted an easier way and a better way, so he built it. His solution may help you, and may also be the inspiration you need to write a tool to solve a problem you’ve been having. Seems good all around no?

As usual, we’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or you’re a repeated visitor. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

What a summer we’re having. July is usually one of the two rainest months in Edinburgh, and instead we’ve been treated to sunshine, warm weather and pleasent weekends along with the usual influx of people. There’s also plenty going on: the Jazz and Blues Festival is kicking off shortly, the summer festivals have released their programmes (including Turing Fest, and further afield, sporsts are happening. Wimbledon is ramping up to Finals weekend, the Tour de France is spinning through Brittany and there’s some Football World Cup stuff going on too. What a collection of things to watch!

This month, we’re back to basics. The thing that sustains any meetup is, well meeting up. It’s the people that make the community, so lets gather as people have as long as we’ve been able to communicate. What are you working on? Have you encountered problems you’d like to talk about? Did you hear about something new you’d like to share, or ask if others have experience of? Are there things you’d like ScotRUG to do or be? Awesome! Bring your ideas!

As usual, we’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, probably with some seasonal berries. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Summer has arrived. The sun is out reasonably often, average temperatures have reached the heady mid-teens, and the cranes are out at Edinburgh castle, building the scaffolding for August and the Tattoo. In British Ruby-land, one of the most important things happening is Brighton Ruby, which takes place in just under a month.

Here in Edinburgh, we’ve got a talk for this month’s meetup. Dave Evans, currently of FreeAgent, is a data scientist and ex particle physicist. He’s coming to talk to us on “The Cargo Cult of the South Seas”. Here’s a taster:

Some of the behaviours that have been observed when less developed societies come into contact with modern industrial technology bear a striking similarity with how science is used and abused in every day life. In this talk I'll revisit the analogy first made by Richard Feynman, and discuss how it permeates everything from project management to software development.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, probably with some seasonal berries. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly group of people, and you’re welcome along whether it’s your first time or one time of many. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

May, tends to be a cloud-light, summer-like wonderland in Edinburgh. Warm out of the wind, long bright days and delicious spring vegetables all across the piece. We’ve had two Ruby conferences in the UK so far this year, with one more to come: Brighton Ruby! Tickets are available.

This month, Alberto Fernández-Capel is coming to talk to us about “Economics and Software Development”. As economics is the study of how people produce and consume goods and services, from food to art, it’s a great lens to study what we do.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and stave off the cold. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly group of humans, and as always newcomers and old timers are equally welcome.

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. This month the receptionist won’t be present, so please wait for a few minutes to see if someone will come out to let you in! If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

April showers bring, well, cloud and rain. Though it’s cold right now, the promise of higher temperatures is strong, and the floral expectation for May is high. The Science Festival is in its last week, with all kinds of lectures and hands on experiments, and on the edges of it all, ScotRUG.

This month, T.J. Sheehy is going to lead a Lean Coffee session, where everyone present has the chance to create topics to talk about and then, well, talk about them.. So, if there’s something you’ve been mulling over, from how can we use concerns in Rails, to what ethical considerations are there when building software, bring ‘em along. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. This month the receptionist won’t be present, so please wait for a few minutes to see if someone will come out to let you in! If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

After snow storms, sunshine. Meterological spring is finally here, though there’s still heavy snow on the Pentlands and in higher portions of Edinburgh. However, the spring warmth of sunshine can be felt during the days (through windows naturally). However, I was certainly inside more than outside over the last week, curled up in the evening reading a book.

We’ll take a similar approach to that this month, looking over a small code file to understand how it’s working. The plan is to look at the code that powers the Rails stats command.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and stave off the cold. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of people and newcomers are most welcome! See you there? Great!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The days are getting longer, though also colder. February is that trickiest of months; not darkest, but still overwhelmingly night. It’s cold too, and since the natural growing season has been so long delayed, the fresh food from local sources is reduced. However, the year is unfurling! Three Ruby conferences are scheduled for the UK, and the promise of spring is tantalizing.

Spring reminds me of the tradition of spring cleaning. You can open your house/flat/office again to the outside world, meaning you can give everything a proper rinse, polish, shine and soak. Refactoring code is a little bit like cleaning your code, getting it into shape to be easier to use over the next while. Ashley Ellis Pierce works at Github and in November presented on Git Driven Refactoring to RubyConf. We’re going to show the video at ScotRUG this month! If you’re curious about refactoring, what SOLID even is, and how git might help, then this is for you. Likewise, if you’ve already seen the video but wanted to discuss it and related topics with other people, come along!

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and stave off the cold. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of people and newcomers are most welcome! See you there? Great!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

It’s 2018! The millenium bug(s) that were largely successfully dealt with would now be of legal drinking age! January is a strange month, both promising renewal and reflection and softening you up for the harsh February weather. ScotRUG this month is here to help you through. This month we have no speaker, so will instead engage in our January tradition of Lean Coffee.

Lean Coffee is a way of generating topics to talk about, without requiring that you a) know anyone or b) be the biggest personality in the room. If there’s a topic you’ve wanted to chat about from user experience research to new Christmas release of Ruby 2.5, this seems like a good time. We’ll supply sticky notes and some kind of writing material, you bring the ideas. As per usual, snacks will be supplied to pull you through to dinner. We’re looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. It was born of the dream to easily manage the software that Apple didn’t provide in an extensible and maintainable way. Over the course of the life of the project it has be come the de facto way for software developers using MacOS to do this. It is also almost entirely written in Ruby.

Have you ever wanted to know what it’s like writing command line applications in Ruby? Or what it’s like to work on a popular open source project? Or how to get involved in such an endeavour? Alyssa Ross is one of the core maintainers of Homebrew, and lives right here in Edinburgh. We’re lucky enough to have her come speak to us about Homebrew and I’m sure will be happy to take questions at the end.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome! See you there then? Smashing.

Hey you wonderful humans! This month (November 2017), ScotRUG is taking a breather. The organisers have a clash of commitments, and so we’re unable to run. If you’re looking to fill your meetup needs, there are lots of other good meetups in Edinburgh. Try OpenTechCalendar for a list.

We’ll see you next month though, for potential social frolics on ice, as well as a talk. Right? Right! Enjoy your Novembers.

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

The light is fading, the nights are cool to cold and autumn vegetables are bountiful. October in Edinburgh marks the start of big coats and warming meals, with the old festival of Samhuinn celebrating the traditional start of winter: fire and feasting.

So, how best to represent this in a Ruby sort of way? Well, the humans of Digital Ocean like to mark the month with the Bavarian inspired Hacktoberfest. From their website: Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software in partnership with Github. In short, a number of contributions will not only yield you gratitude from the project and the community, but it will also net you a sweet t-shirt.

The motivation here is to encourage people to contribute to open source over the course of the month. You can be entirely new to programming, or someone with years of experience, but the point is: the open source community values your input. Contributing can be anything from writing blog posts to building a whole new open source project. Here, Digital Ocean and Github are specifically tracking: writing documentation, raising bugs, working on fixes or working on new features for open source projects. Even with all the material available online, this can feel daunting to achieve by yourself. So, let’s work on it together!

We’ll start the evening with a brief introduction to open source, followed by a list of potential projects that would like your help. People who have contributed to open source before will be around to offer advice, and together we can work on getting your first contribution underway. Some of the projects looking for help may even be things you use regularly! All you’ll need to bring is a touch of enthusiasm, and either a laptop or the happiness to pair up with someone who has one.

To get yourself motivated have a look at: How to Contribute to Open Source. If you’re not a Ruby programmer but are interested anyway, come along! The open source community is bigger than any one technology.

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Sunshine, calmer wind and fewer midges. With the exception of the slow fading of light, September is a glorious month in Scotland. With Edinburgh recovering from the summer fesivals, it’s a good time to be out and about. The last of the comfortable hillwalking for the year, sitting in the slow afternoon sunshine next to a fine island beach, or the gentle bubbling away of a solution to a problem whilst visiting a botanical garden. The possibilities!

Speaking of solutions to problems, Brian Swan is coming to talk to us about refactoring code this month. Refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behaviour. It’s frequently used to make it easier to alter a program when it isn’t immediately clear where you can change it. However, it can be hard to make the leap from understanding how to refactor a small class or function to understand how to refactor a larger system in a big codebase.

Brian has worked a number of companies with large codebases, including currently at FreeAgent. These Jumbo Refactors can be challenging, and are always educational, so we can look forward to some strong lessons this month.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

August! The rain is still here, but there is usually the backup of warmth to go with it. A place alive with people, gawping and gaping, working out how to understand a 3D space with a 2D map. In the middle of almost every night, fireworks flare over the old town, and those impossible hang-over seats that have been building up since late May are finally in use in the castle car park. Yep, the festivals are here.

What with all this clamour and well practiced performers, this month we’re going to hold a more relaxed meetup. Bring along what you’re working on: a problem in a tutorial you’re picking through, some open source project you contribute to, or want to contribute to, or something you’d like to explore. There will be people to share with, folk who will be able to help out. Or indeed bring nothing, and we can just chat about things Ruby and Ruby adjacent.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

July: the odd month of the summer in Edinburgh. Usually the rainiest, the city none-the-less hums with activity in the build up to the Festival and the Fringe. There’s that flurry of other festivals: Film, Magic, Jazz & Blues and the start of the Art Festivals that get underway, and the seating for the Tattoo finally gets finished up, clinging to the edge of the Castle.

This month, we have a short talk from Eva Koleli: An Introduction to Arel. Eva works at FreeAgent, and uses Rails and ActiveRecord there to interact with their database. She’s had cause to jump down a level of abstraction from ActiveRecord to Arel before, and thinks we all might benefit from adding this tool to our Ruby toolbelt. After the talk, Eva will be running a workshop, providing a toy database to help you play around with Arel directly.

When all that is done, there will be plenty of time for questions and for general chat. We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Summer is here! Well, at least summer was here. We seem to been in a bit of an autumnal taster over the last few days. Nevertheless, the temperature is up, the Film Festival is on the horizon, and seasonal allergies have shown up. Both the good and the bad eh?

This month, James Bell will be walking us through a bit of computer history, based on the experiences of a single programmer. In “What Steve Can Teach Us”, he explores understanding the past, and how that can help inform the present and the future.

As usual, we’ll supply some snacks to help get your stomach through to dinner. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen but feel free to bring along your own juice or water to keep you hydrated. ScotRUGgers are a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome. Hopefully, we’ll see some of you there.

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

This far into spring brings plenty of interest. The weather has provided a warm glow, the rattle and hum of barbeques being fired up for the first time. Birds perch in trees, having thoroughly practiced their material. In the city, TradFest has been and gone and the smell of summer is on the horizon. In the Ruby world, RailsConf also took place a few weeks ago, and the videos have started to appear. Another web framework, Hanami, has gone 1.0.

So there’s plenty to talk about. To help facilitate talking in and around Ruby, we’re going to run it Lean Coffee style to talk about whatever comes up! Lean Coffee is a way of generating topics to talk about, without requiring that you a) know anyone or b) be the biggest personality in the room. If there’s a topic you’ve been wanting to discuss in a less formal setting, bring it along! We’ll supply sticky notes and pens and we can go from there.

There will be a modest supply of snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

April in Edinburgh is a glorious month. The Science Festival is on, joined with the traditional first burst of warmth in the year and the arrival of spring food. What a great time for new experiences and for experimentation.

Scott Riley works at Cultivate, and is coming to give us a talk about working with high volume Postgres databases in Rails. Working in web frameworks that ship with Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs) like Active Record can sometimes blunt our appreciation for what’s going on at the storage layer. Here’s an opportunity to sharpen up our understanding of the interaction, also to think about what we might need to change when the volume is turned up.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner, and CodeBase has water available from their kitchen. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception who can guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

March means that spring has arrived. The days are no longer interrupted by incredible stretches of darkness; there’s more light in the world. Wee white and yellow buds start to poke their heads above the ground, marking the return of brighter colours to the natural world. Renewal, and new beginnings.

Heather Burns is a digital law specialist. She spends her work time trying to bridge the gap between digital policy makers and those who are are designing and developing web things that are impacted by such policies. The things you do online, from sending messages to friends on WhatsApp to starting a new business, are impacted by the decisions of people at local, regional and global levels. Understanding current law and pending law can help inform the choices you need to make as to where you store your data, and what you need to say to your local representatives.

Heather has kindly agreed to come and speak to us and share some thoughts on the current state of digital law. Given the pending policital and legal changes, she’s decided to give a talk called “Brexit for Geeks”. As usual, there will be plenty of time for questions afterwards.

We’ll supply some snacks to help get your hunger through to dinner. CodeBase has water available from their kitchen but feel free to bring along your own juice or water. We’re a friendly bunch of humans and newcomers are most welcome. See some of you there?

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors outside reception.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

February is an odd month. Spiced breads and weirdly hollow chocolate can be sensed at the end of the month, but the uncertain transition towards spring is at its messiest early on. The ghost of January is passed, when we met and talked about all manner of things. Paul put together a summary if you’d like a flavour.

Something that had come up at a previous meeting but wasn’t discussed in January is the subject of test doubles. What are they? What different flavours are there? When should you use them? Does it even matter?

At RubyConf in November, Noel Rappin gave a talk on this subject. So we’re going to show the talk, and then discuss it afterwards. Of course, this will also be a time to talk about anything else you’d like.

In a change to the regular occurrence, there will be some snacks. I think CodeBase also has water available, but feel free to bring along your own juice or water. As always, we’re a friendly bunch and newcomers as well as folk who have been before would be most welcome. See you on Thursday!

Where and When?

You’ll know you’re in the right place as “CodeBase” is written across the glass doors outside reception.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

Well looky here, the days are getting longer. They are getting colder too, but let’s focus on the positives. The mind is an odd thing, making days feel longer as more sunlight fills the hours. This month at the ScotRUG meetup, we’re going to fill our hours by talking. We’re going to run a Lean Coffee style meeting, to talk about whatever comes up!

Lean Coffee is a way of generating topics to talk about, without requiring that you a) know anyone or b) be the biggest personality in the room. If there’s a topic you’ve been wanting to discuss in a less formal setting, bring it along! We’ll supply sticky notes and pens and we can go from there. We’re looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Where and When?

When you arrive there will be someone in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

December is upon us! Edinburgh is a city ablaze with lights at night, the smell of wood cabins crowded in Princes Street gardens compliments the noise of the crowds. Around St Andrew’s Square there’s an ice rink for young and old, where experienced skaters help the less experienced, and folk come together. Meanwhile preparations for various numbers of mid-winter celebrations continue, gathering together communities.

In the monthly bringing together of the Ruby community in Edinburgh, we’re lucky to have Greg Sutcliffe coming to speak. Greg is the community lead for The Foreman project, RedHat’s open source server management tool written in Ruby. Greg started out as a Foreman user, using it as a day to day tool to get server management done. His participation within Foreman eventually led him to being hired by RedHat. Fostering community is a challenge, and is an important part of building software, and I’m looking forward to what he has to say.

They’ll be time for questions afterwards, and we’ll likely decamp somewhere close to CodeBase for food when the meetup finishes. See some of you there? Excellent.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in October will be in CodeBase at 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny building on Castle Terrace. The old entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”, and a glorious view of the castle.

When you arrive there will be someone in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

October has arrived, and with it, the soft early autumn fades away. The balance of day/night is tilting firmly to night, and though we haven’t reached Samhuinn yet, the spirit of community pervades things. In that spirit, this month’s meetup will be a hack night. Come out, meet some Ruby folk, and work on some personal projects.

Feel free to bring along something you’re stuck on, something you want to get started with, or something you want to show off! There will be people around willing to help out, or happy to fawn over your latest creation. See you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in September will be in CodeBase at the totally normal time of 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny building on Castle Terrace. The entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”, and a glorious view of the castle.

The room for the meeting hasn’t been confirmed yet. However, there will be folk in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

When you first approach a new programming language, be it Ruby, JavaScript or Elm, one of the quickest ways to get a feeling for it is to quickly fire up an interactive console and play around. Getting there can be awkward, since you have to install the language tools first. Well, Jingkai He has been working on a way to fix that. He’s going to talk us through Koderunr, a project of his that allows you to send and write programs in different languages, either via a web page or via a console, without having to install the language tools yourself.

There will be plenty of time for questions afterwards! We look forward to seeing you all, first-timers or regulars, on Thursday.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in August will kick off in CodeBase at the by now banal time of 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny building on Castle Terrace. The entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”.

Our room hasn’t been confirmed yet. However, there will be folk in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

It’s August, so the festivals will be in full swing. So much music, theatre, circus, comedy and spoken word in one place! It’s also that time in the four year cycle when the Olympics are on. In homage to both these events, we thought it was time for another code kata. A code kata is a small contained programming problem. The idea is that once you’ve finished it, you can try and solve it over and over again, with your familiarity with the problem allowing you to experiment with different approaches.

We last undertook a kata in May, counting lines of Java code. If you’ve got solutions to this you’ve had a play with in the meantime, bring them along! If you haven’t that’s good too!

We’ll be trying something different this month, and as always it should be beginner friendly. We look forward to seeing you there!

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in July will kick off in CodeBase at the increasingly normal time of 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny redeveloped building on Castle Terrace. The entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”. This is the new entrance!

Our room hasn’t been confirmed yet, but we’ll update the site with details when we know for sure. However, there will be folk in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

A couple of years ago, we spent a meetup reading the source code of Ruby’s OpenStruct class. In our efforts to understand what was going on, we ended up learning about Singleton classes, hash references and symbol table misses. We investigated related code and played around with how we might implement the code differently. It’s been a while, and the blowy winds of change make July feel like a good time to gain insight from how other folk solve problems.

We’ll pick a small project via the mailing list, then spend the meetup collaboratively going over it. We look forward to seeing you there! If it’s your first time coming along, we’d love to see you! We’re a friendly bunch with lots of different levels of experience and backgrounds.

Where and When?

Our Edinburgh meeting in June will kick off in CodeBase at our new(ish) time of 18:00. That’s in Codebase’s shiny redeveloped building on Castle Terrace. The entrance on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street is no longer in use, so head around to the other side of the building where you’ll find the glass doors emblazoned with “Codebase”. This is the new entrance!

Our room hasn’t been confirmed yet, but we’ll update the site with details when we know for sure. However, there will be folk in reception to meet you and guide you to the right place. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

RailsConf rolled into Kansas City in May for three days of chatting Rails and Ruby. Kansas is a fair way from Edinburgh, so to mark the occasion we’ll show a 30 minute talk from the last day of the conference. Picking up a thread from last month, this is all about unpacking the magic of building a testing framework, from the creator of MiniTest, Ryan Davis (the framework we used last month). This sounds intimidating at first, but getting the basics together is surprisingly understandable.

General chat and presumably more specific testing chat is sure to follow. We look forward to seeing you there! If it’s your first time coming along, we’d love to see you! We’re a friendly bunch with lots of different levels of experience and backgrounds.

Where and When?

There will be a blackboard up in reception with these details too. Take the lift to ‘L’, and we’ll meet in the area around the lifts; the room itself is through a locked door. If you arrive late and no one is around contact us on Twitter: @scotrug, or send an email to the list. We’ll come and get you!

What?

This month, we’re going to be running a coding kata. A kata is a small contained problem, designed to be easy to understand. The idea is that you can experiment with new approaches over short periods of time.

We’ll be using a style common to code dojos. Which is to say we’ll work through the same small problem in pairs. Each pair will work on the problem for 20 minutes, then take a break, then switch partners. After three rotations, we’ll finish up by talking about and (optionally) presenting the different developed solutions.

Come along to Saramago in the CCA at 18:30 on Thursday 5 May, for questions and chat about writing software in Ruby. We will be at a table in the upstairs bar like last month (not the café downstairs, where we’ve been previously.)

This may be the last Glasgow meetup for a while as David will be away at the beginning of June, and possibly beyond. If you (yes, you!) want to keep the meetup going, drop me a message and I’ll set you up with everything you need as an organizer.

Update

Update: due to absentmindedness I have only just learned that there is an
exhibition on tonight at the CCA, so we will not get the usual table at the
downstairs café. The meetup is going ahead, and I will try to get a corner of
the upstairs bar (also part of the Saramago), but if that is also busy we may
need to move to a nearby pub or café.

I’m so sorry! Especially if you have decided to come along based solely on the
vegan pizza which I foolishly promised.

Get your monthly fix of Ruby help, advice and chat on Thursday 7 April at
18:30 in the CCA Saramago Café!

We’ll be drinking Lean Coffee in deference to
tradition, but there will also be teas, cold drinks and vegan pizzas available
from the bar. Imitation Postits and Sharpies to scribble down discussion topics
will be provided by the organizer.

If you want to get in touch with David (the “organizer”) for any reason at all,
you can do so on Twitter, Meetup or by
email. There are
more details and maps on the Meetup and
OpenTechCalendar
event pages.

Head over to the CCA Saramago Café on Thursday 3 March at 18:30 for a
drink and a chat about Ruby, Rails and web development.

There’ll be the usual Lean Coffee discussion, we’ll
take a look at some of the new stuff coming up in
Rails 5, and this
month we’ll also have a go at tackling a few problems from the
exercism.io Ruby track, so bring a laptop
if you like.

This Thursday’s Edinburgh meeting is on the eve of Jim Weirich’s anniversary. Given Jim’s fondness for visiting Edinburgh, and that we haven’t had a programming session for a while, we will be dedicating the evening to Ruby Koans.

In pairs, we will choose a section of Koans to run through. We’ll discuss what we’ve learnt.

As the Koans haven’t really been updated for a while, we will also try and identify newer (2.x +) concepts to add. Perhaps we could make these the subject of some subsequent meetings.

As usual, we’ll kick off in CodeBase at 19:30. That’s in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Head up to Floor L and we’ll be in the Nor Loch room.

As this is the first Glasgow meetup for a while, this will be a chance
to talk Ruby with new and seasoned developers, get to know the local
Ruby community, and decide on what we want to get from future
meetings.

This workshop will be led by James Bell, aiming to help both current developers
who use open source software on a regular basis to make their first
contributions back, and also to encourage anyone newer to see how easy
it is.

The meeting will be in CodeBase, in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Start will be at 19:30, 20/08/2015; it will be in the Burgh Loch meeting room on floor L. This is the opposite wing to the normal Event Space.

We have a special guest star for August’s Edinburgh meeting, on Thursday 20 August. Austin Ziegler will be talking about Rails deployment with Ansible.

Austin says

We deploy our Rails applications with Ansible. I can cover what we do in Ansible—with a brief introduction on Ansible—but I can also talk about our slug builder for Ansible-based deploys, Cartage

The meeting will be in CodeBase, in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Start will be at 19:30, 20/08/2015; signs will guide you to the correct place, but it will probably be the Event Space on Floor L.

This month’s meeting will be at 19:30 on Thursday 21 May, in a new location. As FreeAgent are moving offices, we will be (at least for now) moving to CodeBase, in Argyle House on the corner of West Port and Lady Lawson Street. Head to floor M (top floor) and you will be directed to the meeting in the Blackford Hill Meeting room (not actually on Blackford Hill).

This month’s topic will be deploying Rails Apps. What is everyone using to deploy Rails Apps these days (apart from Heroku)? What are the pros, cons, and tips?

Trust is the metric that best reflects the quality of our relationships and of our social connections. Without trust, organisational improvements efforts cannot flourish. We reliably find the absence of trust is the cause for teams failing to adopt agile or lean practices successfully. How can trust be developed to support successful adoption?

We’re physically hardwired for connection. Rejection hurts. We get meaning and validation where connection allows us to be authentic. Yet we exist in environments that routinely inform us, that what we do and who we are, is not “Good Enough”. We are shamed into conformity (often masqueraded as improvement) and blamed for failures.

“Management, in most of its incarnations, is an institutionalized form of distrust” say Robert Solomon and Fernando Flores.

This talk explores how we can remain authentic in a blame culture; how we can build authentic trust and enable safe-to-fail environments to strengthen our connections, as well as my own experience applying these practices.

Bio

It’s Marc’s first time at ScotRUG Edinburgh, so here’s an ice-breaker:

Marc Burgauer has experienced professional life as a biologist, an award-winning performance artist and musician, enterprise database architect and early web applications programmer, founder, board member and manager in multiple startups, project manager and coach in multinationals and public services.

Complexity theory defined Marc’s worldview early in life. He quotes Erich Jantsch’s “The Self-organizing Universe” as the pivotal book that he read as a teenager. Marc’s interest in theories about work, including his acclaim of Peter Drucker, was re-ignited when he first adopted XP in 1999.

For the last 15 years, Marc has been keen to test ideas and, as a practitioner, enjoys the application of theories in day-to-day work.

Marc currently focuses his studies on innovation and cultural change while, as a consultant, he encourages organizations to adopt lean and agile practices.

April in Glasgow will see Colin Gemmell talking about the go language.

Talk Description:

Go faster applications

Ruby is a great programming language to write expressive, easy to read code that has thousands apon thousands of libraries to choose from so you don’t have to write any code.

But Ruby has one major issue, it is slow language and it comes to a point where you need to augment your Ruby code with another languge. Github used Erlang, Twitter used Scala but for me the choice is Go.

In this talk I’ll look at why I’ve Go over other programming languages, what’s been gained, what’s been lost and how you can integrate Go applications with existing Ruby apps.

This month, we’ll take a look at some solutions people have come up with for the use case below. Those who wish to can implement all or some of this use case and we’ll discuss the approaches, styles and share suggestions.

Design a Veterinary Information System for a Clinic. Veterinary medical system is very similar to human medical system with one exception, all the patients are animals. Each patient is owned by a person, who brings the patient to the clinic and pays the bills.

The person in charge for IT department of the clinic gave us the following Use Cases to start development.
Dave Atkins brings his pet named Fluffy into the clinic for a routine check up and shots. The veterinarian charges him for the routine office visit and the Rabies vaccination. Dave pays cash before he leaves and is provided with a receipt for the services.

We are pleased to announce that Orde Saunders will be speaking about Building for the device agnostic web.

Talk Description:

We can’t control how our users access our websites - they may use mobile phones, TVs, tablets, games consoles, laptops, desktop computers, or even their glasses and their watch!
In this world, meeting our customers’ needs on their terms is a daunting task.

About Orde

In 1994 Orde viewed the source of a web page, realised it was just a text file, and thought: “I wonder if I can build a web page?”
Since then he’s built a lot of web pages but is still looking at things on the internet and thinking: “I wonder if I can build something like that?”

We are very pleased to announce that Ashley Baxter will be speaking about, well…. I’ll let Ashley explain.

Talk Description:

“Finding myself in the sudden position of running an established business at the age of 18, with no prior experience or knowledge of the industry, I share my experience of teaching myself the necessary skills to run a web-based business, learning to code and bringing a web app to market, and trying to steer it in a new direction altogether.”

About Ashley:

“An unusual combination of insurer and photographer, Ashley’s big girl’s job is running insurance broker, Brokers Direct. She has also been known to photograph weddings under the Girl With A Camera alias. Ashley reserves what little time she has for Xbox, weightlifting and convincing people that working in insurance isn’t as mundane as it sounds.”

We seem to have made the Fuzzy Orange offices office our new home and we quite like it. You can find it at,
Pentagon Centre,
Unit 313,
Glasgow,
G3 8AZ

Join us at FreeAgent for 19:30 for an exciting Edinburgh meetup. First Paul Wilson will give a brief overview of his experience at this year’s RubyConf followed by a discussion on the future of ScotRUG (Edinburgh). Let’s work out the answers to:-

What do we want out of ScotRUG? Talks, guest speakers, hacking, our own projects?

We are very pleased to announce that Stephen Best (Bestie) will be travelling all the way from London especially to speak to us and as a special treat we’ll be putting on some pizza and refreshments!

Talk Description:

Most of us have heard the vague, hand waving spiel about why DI is important for writing flexible, reusable code, a little harder to come by are examples of how one actually goes about doing it in a (cost) effective manner.

Rather than a dry introduction to DI, this talk will be packed full of code examples demonstrating practical techniques you can start using straight away, no gems, meta-programming or magic required. We’ll also explore how you might persuade your Rails app to benefit from DI.

About Stephen:

Bestie is a London based Ruby / Javascript / XP contractor, committed to software craftsman and OO design obsessive.

This month we have a new venue at the Fuzzy Orange offices, which are at the
Pentagon Centre,
Unit 313,
Glasgow,
G3 8AZ

Brian Swan will be previewing his Lean Agile Scotland talk “Help, my tests are killing me.” This talk will examine the characteristics of readability in tests and offer advice on making your tests more readable.

Joe likes to think about how and why he does things, he doesn’t always understand what he’s doing, but he’s good at looking competent. Come to ScotRUG to hear about what Joe learned over the last 6 months about SOLID, Git, regex and tooling choice while moving from looking competent to finally getting it.

As suggested by Iain Watt, this month will be all about mob rule. The general idea is that we all work on the same piece of code together.
We’ll pick a kata or some such that we can get our teeth into and see how we go. The aim is more to see how others attack a problem
rather than to have something finished and working.

If anyone has any ideas on what problem/kata/Ruby quiz we could have a go at, please email the google group

By popular demand, February’s ScotRUG is all about the codez. As discussed at last month’s meeting, many people are coding projects in isolation and others want to get an outside look. Bring your code along for constructive ideas on how it might be better and advice on those tricky problems.

All discussion will be under FriendDA terms. Usual place (FreeAgent), usual time (19:30).

In February we are very luck to have Graeme bringing his successful Server-sent Events talk to Glasgow. In the talk Graeme will discuss connecting your browser to your message queue with Server-sent events, which are simpler than Websockets but unidirectional.

No matter what they tell you, it’s always a people problem- Jerry Weinberg

November’s ScotRUG will be a slight departure from our normal technial diet. Well-known Rubyist and New Context Regional Director, Joe O’Brien will take us on a deep exploration of one or two “People Patterns”: patterns for interacting with our customers and colleagues.

These skills are essential for success in your progrmming career - especially if you want to build valuable products, be appreciated, and have your point of view properly acknowledged. You don’t need to be a Rubyist to come along.

For the November meetup we have Steven Baker will be joining us all the way from Canada.

###Bio:
Steven Baker is the one of the key figures in the Ruby community. He
is the creator of RSpec, the Behavior Driven Development framework for
Ruby, and is often a featured speaker at many of the Ruby and Ruby on
Rails conferences. Steven has seen over two dozen Rails applications
to production development, utilizing his specific skills in
scalability, security, and maintainability. Steven continues to
collaborate with leaders of the Agile and Ruby communities and
provides training and consulting for organizations to improve their
knowledge, effectiveness, and manage growth.

This month is a Extreme Startup again. See below for the description from XP 2012.

Extreme Startup

In this hands-on workshop we aim to simulate product teams building
software and delivering it into a market. Attendees form teams and
compete to build the best product. Through the session you can
continue to refine and upgrade your software, releasing new versions
and testing their performance in the market. Once your software is
live it will begin to accrue points, as simulated users use the
software and score it against how well it fits their needs. The
earlier you release your software, the sooner you will start accruing
points, and the earlier you can learn something about the market,
which should inform your next iteration. In the lean startup movement,
this is know as the Build-Measure-Learn cycle.

Attendees of this session will need to build a very simple webapp,
probably as part of a pair or a small team, so you will need at least
one laptop per team.

So that we can get started quickly, it would be helpful if
participants could do a little bit of preparatory work. Set up a
minimal webapp running locally on your machine that handles a GET
request, with a request param ‘q’, (e.g.
http://localhost:4567/?q=Adam) and returns a plain text response. For
example, using Sinatra:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
configure do
set :port, 4567
end
get '/' do
q = params[:q]
"Hello #{q}"
end

For the October meetup Iain Watt will be expanding on his Scot Ruby Conf lightening talk.

###Bio:
Being brought up in the 70’s on a diet of Horizon & Tomorrows World I was always going to be interested in tech. I got my first proper hands-on exposure to tech with a BBC micro and haven’t looked back since. IBM and Compaq paid me to play with robotics, material handling systems, and manufacturing data collection & reporting systems - to build new stuff or to make things better. Fortunately I love to learn so that I can build new stuff or make things better but I hate it when something (particularly IT) doesn’t work the way I want it to.

###Talk:
“The most important book you’ve never read, or possibly even heard of” I’ll introduce you to a handful of what Dr. John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist and affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine, intriguingly terms “Brain Rules”. In the book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, Medina explains, why we might want to re-evaluate our approach to our environments and to our practices in education, at work and at home to get the best from the most powerful tool we have at our disposal - our brain - and to harness the latest research findings to improve our learning capabilities. If you’re in any way interested in learning about learning and getting better at the things that interest you, come along to hear my talk. Hopefully I will convince you to go buy the book. Is it “The most important book you’ve never read, or possibly even heard of”? Probably.

September we have T.J. Sheehy bringing the wisdom of Charlie Chaplin to Glasgow ruby user group.

Chaplin’s Craft:

Charles Chaplin was intimately involved in crafting every part of his movies. His development techniques and approach to story design challenged the popular film making techniques of his day. What are the similarities and differences between Chaplin’s film making approach and how we create software? What insights can we gather from his work to help improve our own craft?

June’s ScotRUG will be a a sneak-preview of a couple of Scottish Ruby Conference talks. Talks will be limited to 35 minutes; save your questions and feedback until afterwards.

Shadowboxing your way to a secure application, by Rory McCune

There are a number of potential approaches that developers and testers can take to reviewing the security of their applications and a growing number of tools to help the process along.

“Traditional” black box web application scanners and static analysis tools (aka white box tools) both have pros and cons in terms of things they will find and more importantly, things that they won’t.

This talk aims to review the ups and downs of both approaches and specific ruby based tools that can be used as part of the process. It will also highlight some areas where good old manual review is still key.

#How we learn a language by Ryan Stenhouse

We all use language in fun and interesting ways, even when we don’t think about it. Our industry brings us together with people from all over the world, even some of the folks attending this conference will speak English as a second or even third language.

In a past life I was a teacher of english as a foreign language, and these days I’ve kept that passion for languages alive by becoming multilingual myself.

I’ll speak about how we pick up a programming language in much the same way as we learn to speak a natural language and then integrate ourselves in the culture surrounding that programming language in much the same way.

I’m not going to talk at boring lengths about language theory, but instead evaluate how we learn a language as humans – regardless of its origin. I hope to make it clear that you can apply some of – if not all – the same skills you use to easily pick up a new programming language to give you a real leg-up in learning a foreign language.

You’ll never think about abstraction or obfuscation in exactly the same way again, and hopefully leave with a desire to test my assertion and learn another language, and that would be just great. Why would I want to do this? Well, I’m biased but I truly believe that the world would be a better place if people understood each other better – and that means more people becoming multilingual.

Phil Roberts has just finished a large rewrite of Float to be a javascript-heavy front-end based application using
Backbone.js. Phil will be telling us about the reason for the change, his experiences, and introducing us to Backbone.js.

Thanks to strategic powercuts and other ridiculous problems, the December ScotRUG did not quite go to plan. But next week we will be back on form. We have 3 (3!!!) talks lined up, plus free (as in beer) beer from FreeAgent. Yay!

Ryan Stenhouse will be talking about cultural differences when programming people-facing applications

Sam Elliott will be taking us on a magical mystery tour of the more obscure (read exciting) corners of Ruby’s core classes and Standard Lib.

Paul Wilson will be giving a quick demo of Mountable Apps in Rails 3.1.x.

December ScotRUG is being held early and at a different location. It is at Cargo, at 129 Fountain Bridge, EH3 9QG; google map is here.

We will start at 18:00 for Ruby chats, which will include a Ruby Quiz with a special prize. At 19:00 those sufficiently ticketed will join the Edinburgh Startup Christmas party in the same venue. Tickets can be bought here, though at 11:00 on the 15th there was only one ticket remaining. Use the code ‘timewarp’ to get a bit of cash off, if you are fast enough.

Do not forget that we’ll be meeting at the brand new venue of FreeAgent’s new digs, 40 Torphichen Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8JB, It is in the glass-fronted building on the right hand side of the road, just before the sharp bend if you are walking away from Haymarket. See the snapshot on Google Maps here. There is no FreeAgent signage, but there is a big 40 on the glass.

Those lovely people at FreeAgent have offered to host Edinburgh ScotRUG meetings at their fabulous new offices, near Haymarket station. They have even said that they may be able to provide us with a beer or two in their offices. The first meeting in this location will be on 20 October, 2011. (If their sofa reminds you of anything, best not to mention it though.)

The new venue is 40 Torphichen Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8JB, or here on Google Maps.

Suggested by Matt Wynne, September’s meetup is going to be all about making stuff. We will kick off the session with 5 minute presentations by people with project ideas, then we will break up into groups and start working on the project. We’ve already had a few ideas suggested on the mailing list.

Matt Wynne wants to make a start on a test-based dynamic analysis tool for Ruby, DARTS.

Extreme Startup

In this hands-on workshop we aim to simulate product teams building
software and delivering it into a market. Attendees form teams and
compete to build the best product. Through the session you can
continue to refine and upgrade your software, releasing new versions
and testing their performance in the market. Once your software is
live it will begin to accrue points, as simulated users use the
software and score it against how well it fits their needs. The
earlier you release your software, the sooner you will start accruing
points, and the earlier you can learn something about the market,
which should inform your next iteration. In the lean startup movement,
this is know as the Build-Measure-Learn cycle.

Attendees of this session will need to build a very simple webapp,
probably as part of a pair or a small team, so you will need at least
one laptop per team.

So that we can get started quickly, it would be helpful if
participants could do a little bit of preparatory work. Set up a
minimal webapp running locally on your machine that handles a GET
request, with a request param ‘q’, (e.g.
http://localhost:4567/?q=Adam) and returns a plain text response. For
example, using Sinatra:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
configure do
set :port, 4567
end
get '/' do
q = params[:q]
"Hello #{q}"
end

Thanks to Martin for coming all the way from Berlin, as part of the new Ruby User Group Speaker Exchange Programme. You can find out more about the programme here. Also thanks to EdgeCase for covering the flights.

The June meeting is going to be a bit special - the first in a new European Speaker Exchange Programme masterminded by the Berlin Ruby User Group. Martin Rehfeld will be talking about the lessons learned developing his new service Assets.io featuring dynamic Javascript and CSS delivery through the Amazon Cloudfront CDN. Other parts include a custom backend using evented Ruby code (Thin/Async Rack/Eventmachine). It promises to be an exciting meeting, and in due course we’ll be catapulting one of our own speakers over the North Sea to Berlin. Martin will be in Edinburgh from June 14 to June 17, so let’s all make him welcome.

Ruby Golf is going the rounds of a few user groups. During the Edinburgh May meeting, we will jump on the band wagon for a 9-hole round. The aim will be to complete the 9 hole course, laid out in RSpec, in as few characters as possible.

As promised, the March meeting will be another Ruby Koans session; this time we will be concentrating on blocks. Bring your laptops if you can, and it would be helpful to have downloaded the Koans and are ready to start. The Ruby Koans website is here

The January meeting is an experiment to determine scientifically whether Mocks suck or do they rock. This will be done with live coding using a rigid methodolgy which we will make up on the spot. Bring a laptop if you have one. Also get the codes.

The January session will be on 20 January 2011, at the at the usual place: Edinburgh Training Centre, 16 St. Marys Street, EH1 1SU. We do not have an agenda yet, but more lightning talks are a possibility.

To cheer the dismal November days, come along to ScotRUG at 19:00 on Thursday November 18 to be heartened by cheery lightning talks at the at the usual place: Edinburgh Training Centre, 16 St. Marys Street, EH1 1SU.

Thanks to Tanja Pislar for her new design of the ScotRUG site, with rounded CSScorners and everything. (Our previous design looked it was something knocked up by a programmer,without any particular design talent, in 20 minutes based on an old WordPress theme). Hope you enjoy it.

Two ScotRUG members have upcoming conference talks. Drew Neil is presenting at Arrrr Camp in Ghent on the 29th of October, and Paul Wilson at RubyConf in New Orleans on the 12th of November. At the October ScotRUG meeting they will both present slightly condensed versions of their talks.

I’ve made a small step towards making the ScotRUG site more maintabable, and giving us a little bit of history. I have converted it to Jekyll. It is still not very pretty, but we can work on that. The source is on GitHub here. For now, if anyone wants to make it a bit nicer, please fork and send me a pull request.

By popular demand the next meeting will be an interactive session on Ruby Koans. Bring your laptops for some fun coding. Kickoff will be at 19:30 with a walkthrough. Then we will pair up and code through some more. We will have a debrief at the end followed (no doubt) by a visit to the Holyrood Tavern.